A very merry tale of romance that’s perfect for the holiday season.
A highborn lady must marry outside her class to save her family’s finances in Matthews’ (The Matrimonial Advertisement, 2018, etc.) latest Victorian romance.
Sophia Appersett is an appealing choice for a man looking for a wife. She’s smart, beautiful, sensible, and has what’s seen as the proper pedigree. Edward “Ned” Sharpe is an eligible bachelor—a self-made man with a substantial fortune but an unfortunate lack of experience in dating nobility. Ned follows poor advice in a gentleman’s etiquette book and manages to appear sullen, staid, and altogether disinterested in Sophie. As a result, she assumes that they have nothing in common and makes a move to end their courtship. But then Sophie catches a glimpse of the man beneath the mask and realizes that perhaps Ned feels things more deeply than she suspected. She proposes that they try to speak honestly with each other and encourages Ned to bring his parents to the Appersetts’ estate in Derbyshire over the holidays. Matthews includes all the required elements of a cozy English Christmas and a classic Victorian love story. Ned is the strong, silent type, and Sophie is predictably unaware of her own appeal; their budding romance is challenged by external forces, not the least of which are their respective parents: Sophie’s father is determined to modernize his estate and has spent both his daughters’ dowries in the quest for advancement, while Edward’s mother visibly disapproves of Sophie and her perceived snootiness. Yet the spirit of the season wins out, and the couple’s future is never really in doubt. Matthews’ novella is full of comfort and joy—a sweet treat for romance readers that’s just in time for Christmas. As in her previous historical romance novels, Matthews addresses hot topics in Victorian society; this time around, the theme is adaptation, as Sophie invites members of differing social classes to the Christmas celebration: “We’re part of the modern age,” Sophie tells her sister. “We must change along with it or be left behind in the dust.”
A very merry tale of romance that’s perfect for the holiday season.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9990364-7-1
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Perfectly Proper Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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